We have freezing rain all around us, it’s a good day to stay indoors.
Checking out the new camera.
Merry Christmas to me I got a new phone.
Merry Christmas!
Bleed Cubbie Blue: Twas the night before Cub Christmas, 2025
Tradition has us celebrating the birth of Jesus on December 25 although we don’t know the exact date of his birth. The date may have more to do with Roman tradition than fact, but what I do like about the date is that it coincides with the slow increase in daylight starting on December 21 for those of us in the northern hemisphere.
The light of Christ is constantly breaking in to the world but remember, light is that by which we see.
For a while I thought we were going to have a white Christmas, but that doesn’t look likely now. Today the temp was 14 degrees above average.
My MacBook is now pretty much my only desktop computing device and so now I am beginning to build the muscle memory for all of the keyboard shortcuts. Having been mostly in the Windows world all these years, the Command key is somewhat of a foreign concept. If you have any tips please share them.
My first act last Friday upon ending my last work day was to cleanse my desk of the work PC. Now my MacBook is a first class citizen rather than an interloper.
While technically I am not retired, I am thinking of myself as retired because I no longer have any work responsibilities. I think this is a mindset change more than anything. For example, normally when I start the Christmas vacation/holiday, I see the amount of unscheduled/committed time I have as finite because I know that it ends on New Years day. Not this year, this morning I am thinking more in terms of new routines. When do I want to get up? How do I want to start my mornings?
Friday, December 19 was my last work day at DXC. My retirement is officially on December 31, 2025 but I am now on holiday until then. Friday held within itself a bundle of emotions, starting with completing my last time sheets (weekly time reporting is perhaps the most important act of a DXC employee), then going to lunch with my wife, wrapping up with video calls with two of my former bosses who are no longer with DXC and another with those whom I have been working
I met my wife through work, specifically at an after work party that started with dinner and drinks at What’s On Second and an evening show of Second City at The Attic Theatre. The first time spent by just the two of us was during a work day lunch at the West Side deli. West Side no longer exists but we had our lunch at a nearby Potbellys, a place I often got lunch from when I worked at the Renaissance Center in Detroit. It seemed to be the best place to go for my final work day lunch.
Day 3 of the micro.blog photo challenge - evergreen. #mbdec
I don’t know what is worse as a Chicago Cubs fan. The frustration during the season when the players don’t perform as expected or the frustration during the off season when the front office don’t perfom as expected.
We have had very frosty weather the last several days. Way too early for me. #Frost #mbdec
Today is my last work Monday, and as every milestone passes the idea of my being retired becomes more real. The company has a mandatory “shut down” for the last two weeks of the year, so while my last official day as an employee is December 31, 2025, this coming Friday will be my last actual day “in the office.”
Finished reading: Separation of Church and Hate by John Fugelsang 📚
We got five inches of snow over night. I think the probability of a white Christmas is high.
Beginnings And Endings
As I wind down my 36 year career in information technology I feel that I am in a nostalgic loop, which is probably inevitable particularly when I am closing down my career 37 years to the dates when it started. I find myself thinking all the way back to high school and reasons why I decided to go to Michigan Technological University (MTU) for a degree in Computer Science.
In the early 80s computer science was just becoming a thing, in fact Computer Science was a part of the Mathematics department at MTU and not the separate college that it is today. If when I was starting college I was asked what it was that I was studying to become I would have answered “a programmer.” Of course, over the course of my five years at MTU I learned Computer Science was more than programming, but that was still its core competency.
I think nearly everyone who I may have told I was going to be a programmer would have had an appreciation for my career choice because while they may not have understood exactly what that meant they likely knew that computers were the “hot thing” and programming was done on computers.
The irony is, of my 36 year career programming turned out to be the least of what I did, what programming I did was done during the first three years and then fate moved me on to more broader topics like the SEI Capability Maturity Model and technology architecture. Turns out my learning to program a computer was merely a foot in the door.
Happy eighth blog anniversary to me. In my first post on this site I said that I wanted a posting switchboard, which is what micro.blog provides me although I am not as selected of which locations to which a post is sent than I thought I would be.
In a blog post Dave Rogers describes mine and your obligation to the men and women who served in the United States military as a duty of care. I think this is a very important point about our obligations, not our feelings but rather how should see ourselves as committed to providing to those who made a commitment to us.
For me my obligation is to only ask these people to do the things that put their lives on the line when it is absolutely necessary. One of the largest moral failings of the United States is the casualness at which its government has caused the death of its own and others in the world. All military action should have strong scrutiny from the perspective if whether such action is absolutely necessary. Determination of what is absolutely necessary must go behind the whims of whoever services in the White House.
In this Congress fails to meet its obligation as our representatives. To fix this Congress needs to state there is no such thing as a war on drugs or a war on terror as such things are too broad and go well beyond the understanding of war as known to the founders. Congress can enforce this by ending the national emergencies that it has declared over the years.